Activating Phased deployment

Since this is a pre-release feature you need to specify that you want to activate this feature before you can use it, this can be done either during the upgrade process or from the ConfigMgr console as soon as you have updated to version 1802.

Recommend you also check out this doc about pre-release features from Microsoft

Creating a Phased deployment

Let’s take a quick look at this and head over to a task sequence and in this particular case we will try to do a phased deployment with the “Awesome task sequence” and from there we will right-click on the Task sequence and choose ” Create Phased deployment” (We also have an icon for to do this see picture 2)

A wizard will appear were we need to specify a name and choose our pilot collection and production collection

Once we clicked “Next” we get some options to configure

Criteria for success of the first phase

Deployment success percentage – Were we can specify a critera between 0-100 %

Conditions for beginning the the second phase of deployment after success of the first phase

Automatically begin this phase after a deferral period in days – Pick how many days after the success of the first phase the production deployment should start. (From my own testing if you choose 0 days it will start within minutes once the the deployment success percentage has been reached)

Manually begin the second phase deployment – Determine if we want to start it manually or not

Once the device is targeted, apply the upgrade

As soon as possible

Deadline time (relative to the time the device is targeted) – Choose between hours, days, weeks, months

Click “next” and you will get an overview of the different deployment phases, you can reorder them, Add and Edit.

Continue to the end of the wizard and once done you will find the phased deployments

As we can see in the previous pic there’s one Phased deployment and at this time we only have 1 deployment because that deployment haven’t reached the success percentage we configured in the wizard.

You also have a few options on the Phased deployment to either manually move it to the next phase or if you want to suspend the phases by right-clicking on the phased deployment or by selecting it and do it from the bar at the top.

Once the first phase has reached the success percentage we configured and the clients have reported back to ConfigMgr within a few minutes ( Becasue we configured the “Automatically begin this phase after a deferral period in days” to 0, if we would have gone with 1 day deferral it would wait until that time to kick off phase 2 )

There’s a bunch more settings we could have gone through but I will leave at this as for now and probably do a video showcasing it more in depth.

I didn’t touch on troubleshooting in this post but if you want to look at the log files these are the ones that you should look to over at the primary site server.

The ConfigMgr product group just keeps on producing builds for us to test out and here is the latest one, ConfigMgr Technical Preview 1801. One of the new features they introduced that caught my attention was something they called “Phased deployment” and in the documentation

they wrote:

Phased deployments automate a coordinated, sequenced rollout of software without creating multiple deployments. In this Technical Preview version, the phased deployment wizard can be completed for task sequences in the admin console. However, deployments are not created.

Let’s take a quick look at this and head over a task sequence and in this particualar case we will try to do a phased deployment with the “Awesome task sequence” and from there we will right-click on the TS and choose ” Create Phased deployment”

A wizard will appear were we need to specify a name and choose our pilot collection and production collection

Once we clicked “Next” we get some options to configure and they seem to be self explanatory

Criteria for success of the pilot phase

Deployment success percentage – Were we can specify a critera between 0-100 %

Conditions for beginning the production phase of deployment

Automatically begin this many days after the success of the pilot phase – Pick how many days after the success of the pilot phase the production deployment should start

Wait for me to manually being this phase of deployment – Determine if we want to start it manually

Once the production phase begins, target all the devices within days – Choose number of days

Once the device is targeted, apply the upgrade

As soon as possible

Deadline time (relative to the time of the device is targeted) – Choose between hours, days, weeks, months

Click “next” and you will get an overview of the different phases

Next up is to set a failure rate where the deployments will be stopped if the failure rate is above X procent

Once done with the Wizard you will find the phased deployment under the lower statusbar.

As stated in the release docs for 1801 the phased deployment in this release doesn’t create any deployments so the feature Isnt “working” yet but I personally think its a really good Idea thats needs some fine tuning for sure but the concept Is awesome ! Can’t wait for the “updated” version of this feature so we can play around some more with it.

Last night for us Europeans there was another ConfigMgr Technical Preview release and this time its version 1710. There are many new great features indroduced to this Technical Preview and the full overview you can find over at Microsoft.

The Wizard

One of the big updates here is the wizard and the ability to get realtime output to show up in the wizard during execution of the script.

When executing the script you will see a green statusbar that indicates that somethings i happening and under that you know have box that will populate with data onces the client have runned the script and reported back which just takes a few seconds.

(Side note, The script I’m running below is just a Ping to localhost on each client)

One of the options you have is the “Script details” found in the botton left corner and here you will se information like “Script name, Script Version, Last modified Time, Collection ID”

In the middle you have “Summary” which is the default one you will see and from here you can change how you want to view the data.

The data you can view is

Script output

Script Exit code

and you can view them as

Bar Chart

Pie Chart

Data table

You can also view this information on scripts you ran histroically if you go to Monitoring -> Script Status and right-click and than click on Show status (You will also able to preview the some information in the lower part of the console)

After clicking on Show Status you will get prompted by this windows containing all the info we saw in the Wizard when executing the script and can sort the data in the same way.

Parameters

The next thing i want to showcase is the Parameter functionallity which gives us the ability to specify a parameter when executing the script towards a collection. Here we are creating a new script which is called “Ping Parameter”

and in this script we will add a parameter and then do a ping with a variable based on that parameter.

Once clicking “Next” we get option to Edit the Parameter

From here we can change a few options like Data Type, required true or false etc. Also able to add a Description that will show up later when executing the script.

Once configured click next and then you have to approve the script as always. Next step is to run the script and when we do that we get the following option now to enter a parameter. In this case we need to enter the computer name we want to ping with the ping script we just created.

The description box shows the information we wrote earlier telling the user who executes the script some information about the parameter and what they need to enter.

We run the script and gets prompted with information as expected

but if we check under “Script Details” we find additional information on the parameter we entered

These are really cool additions to this great feature and I’m really happy that the ConfigMgr team just keep on working on it and add functionallity. Hopefully we can see some of these changes to the pre-release feature in the next ConfigMgr CB build.

I recently stumble upon a bug in ConfigMgr that can cause issues with application deployments so that applications won’t install. When you are creating and application and gets to the step where you are supposed to create a Deployment type and you give the deployment type a name containing some certain special characters this will cause you not to be able to install the application when deployed to a collection.

Following special characters have been tested and won’t cause any issues:

/ & ! # @ –

These special characters will cause issues:

\ ”

Example

Here you have an example where the Name field contains a backslash “Install\Uninstall”.

When trying to Install the application that contains the backslash character it can look like this where it just keeps saying “installing..” and won’t continue until you go to another pane and back and you will see the “Install” button again

Here’s a another example with different app but with the same scenario for the deployment type name and it can show up is with an error message like this:

And in some instances the application won’t show up at all (app that should appear is WinRar 5.4.0)

Here’s a short video showing off the issue

Workaround

So whats the workaround if this happens? Well it’s pretty simple actually.

Just rename the deployment type and remove the special character that caused the issue and let the client run an application deployment evaluation cycle and the installation will continue just fine.

Se which special characters that i found so far that will work and won’t work in the beginning of this post.

I want to share a script that came about after i wanted to get hold of all the WMI-queries that’s been created and used for populating different device collections without need to go in to every single one of them and extract the query manually. Especially if you are dealing with larger environments who might have hundreds of device collections and first of all figuring out which one actually uses WMI-queries and who doesn’t.

What do we want to achieve

Extracts all the WMI-queries used in SCCM and outputs them in to a .txt files for each Device Collection.